“The ‘issue’ [behind the series] is and was torture—political and familial,” said Smith. “It was the main reason I wrote ‘The Inquisitor,’ and continued exploring it in the sequel, ‘The Confessor.’ I very much wanted to draw a connecting line between political interrogation and familial and child abuse, to explore one of the darkest, sad realities of the human condition—that the ability to torture is not some rare aberration, but an all-too frequent occurrence in everyday life.”

The series was inspired by an incident that occurred in 1980 when Smith was an investigative news producer for ABC’s 20/20. He said, “I became involved in a story about a brutal political torture/murder by the secret police of Paraguay’s right-wing dictatorship. The victim was Joel Filartiga, the 17 year-old son of a courageous doctor and political dissident, Dr. Jose Filartiga. Dr. Filartiga and his daughter, Dolly, came to America, armed with a harrowing story and photographs of the son’s tortured body. It was a shocking awakening, and stayed with me, and changed me.

“In 1987, the murder of six-year old Lisa Steinberg in New York City after years of torture by her adoptive father became a national outrage. More stories about parental abuse started to emerge. I had become a father, and I remember holding my sleeping three-year old son in my arms and trying to put myself inside the head of a man who tortures his own child. Then another thought came: If a child survives years of torture, who do they grow up to be?” How do they anchor themselves in the world?”

    -INTERVIEW: Interview with thriller author Mark Allen Smith (Terry Ambrose, July 21, 2015, The Examiner)